Will the Solve-the-Riddle Hiring Trend Affect IT? 579
An anonymous reader wonders: "It's probably harder to find a good developer, than for a developer to find a job. Seems to be a Google-riddle trend; rather than caring about references/diplomas/resumes, employers are using solve-this-and-you-have-a-job approach, not even caring about any usual information. Does that give decent graduates/talented unexperienced devs/homegrown coders a chance at the corporate job, or does it alienate potential matches?"
Can't solve the puzzle, so you're trying Slashdot? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or more precisely, I don't need a job in Quebec, nor do I particularly want to work with PHP for a living. So I wasn't particularly interested in submitting my resume and 'PHP code'. Still, it's kind of a neat site. I would encourage companies looking for high-end talent to do more of this as a recruitment effort. After all, it had me intrigued enough to solve their little puzzle (even if it was overrated) despite not looking to work for them.
Unfortunately, the comparison with Google is poor. Google requires that you have a Masters Degree (PhDs are preferrable) before they even give you their test. Then they're so secretive that they may never get back to you even if you complete their test perfectly. You'll never even know why they didn't get back to you, despite a promise to start an interview process after the test.
As a result, the two don't really compare.
P.S. The Prove Your Worth site really does track your movements via (some rather ugly looking) Javascript. So move carefully.
Answer (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect that its not necessarily that you solve the riddle this instant, they probably want to get an insight into how you think and how you solve problems.
Problem solving is a huge part of developing software and an important quality to have in a candidate
Re:I like this (Score:5, Interesting)
Is your hiring policy so brain-dead that any blot on a criminal background check is an automatic disqualifier? Or is a potential candidate given a chance to explain? We live in times when it seems that everything is illegal. No one gets through a day without doing something illegal. No one gets through a month without committing a serious crime. (Well, at least that's true if you have a half-way fun sex life.) Is your requirement for a negative background check absolute? If so, why?
Re:Can't solve the puzzle, so you're trying Slashd (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a good filter (Score:3, Interesting)
It is a good filter when it comes to separating those who have relevant skills from those who are good at pretending. You can't cheat at "riddles". You can't talk and weasle out of them. You can't impress the interviewer. Don't forget that in HR, few if any people have relevant coding skills. Now, you want to hire a coder. The HR guy hasn't the foggiest what assembler or an export table is, but he should hire someone who can read assembler and understand foreign 80x86 code. How should he do it? Would you rather have the HR guy listen to someone rambling about his "achivements" and qualifications, or do you hand him a paper saying:
What does this do:
POP EBX
INC EBX
PUSH EBX
RET
(together with the correct answer, of course).
Which strategy do you think will give you the better qualified applicants for the final examination?
Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park (Score:5, Interesting)
Out here in Orange County, IGN Entertainment is infamous for their tests. I went in and nailed the interview. The next level to advance to was a test. The test was to implement a small web server (GET/HEAD commands basically) in C++ using *no external libraries of any kind*. They stated the test should take 3 - 4 hours. The specs were extremely vague and any attempt I made to get clarification was met with "do what you think is best".
They also mailed me the test late on a thursday evening, and were calling asking where it was the following monday morning. Problem being I was currently working 50/60 hours a week as well, and it just happened to be the weekend I was moving :(
I ask you then, how is anyone who currently *has* a job and perhaps a family supposed to complete a test like this? It seems like the most talented candidates would *HAVE* jobs and therefore find it much more difficult to complete the test. I rushed the program together because -- what choice did I have? It did not represent me well.
Looking back, the only appropriate response on my part would have been to say "Your requirements suck, and this is not a 3 to 4 hour job. Thanks but no thanks." The entire thing was a waste of their time, waste of my time. Maybe that was the test, to see if I'd tell them to fuck off.
College is a game (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's mostly proof that you can play the game.
There are two games.
1. The technical education which is the following game.
They ask a question.
You determine what the real question is.
You find the right book.
You read how to answer the question.
You answer the question.
2. The People game.
You learn how to make people happy and play the politics and admin game. I think this is the real reason most education administrations are described as a nightmare, it's actually part of the learning experience.
Later you play the sales/job interview game. They're pretty much the same, only the product changes.
Re:Thought Processes (Score:4, Interesting)
I knew a guy who went into an interview and was asked to solve some intractable problem. He was able to point out that their request wasn't feasible and provided some alternate options. This story wouldn't be interesting, of course, if he hadn't gotten the job.
I suspect that even if a person couldn't have written a webserver in C++ in 4 hours, they might still have had a shot at the job depending upon how they approached the problem.
My 'puzzle' experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Oddly I didn't get the job. They said I lacked the ability to document. Funny since I graduated with a degree in technical writing. Maybe they just wanted people to come in an debug for them in interviews.
Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park (Score:5, Interesting)
I once had an interview where they handed me a few lines of abberent C code and asked what's the output. I answered that it didn't matter, because C code should never be written like that. Production C code should never look like an entry in the Obfuscated C contest.
That was the wrong answer, of course, and I didn't get an offer, but I figured a sysadmin job at a place that wanted me to be able to read obfuscated C entries probably wasn't the place I wanted to work anyway.
Geoff
Re:It's a good filter (Score:3, Interesting)
POP EBX
INC EBX
PUSH EBX
RET
More often than not, crashes the machine.
Maybe so. A better question might be - Why would you want to use code like this or similar code? On the 65xx, one way of passing arguments to a subroutine was having them embedded in the code stream. So the return address is a pointer to your arguments. You deal with them, then adjust the return address to skip the arguments, push it, then return. So do I get the job???
Hey! We interviewed at the same place! (Score:3, Interesting)
So during the interview, they revealed that they were expecting to support about 1,000,000 clients with updates every minute. "Oh?", says I, "how much data are you pushing to each user every minute?" They answered with, "we're very efficient! Only about 1KB." "And how much bandwidth do you have?", I pressed. "We just added a third T1," they replied with obvious pride.
Apparently my riddle was to figure out how to push 137Mbps through a 4.5Mbps pipe.
And they were betting their company's future on my ability to answer it.
The "exam" ended when they discovered that I wasn't planning to move to their city to take the 100% telecommuting position, even though I'd made that perfectly clear on my resume, cover letter, and application. They apparently also sucked at measuring distances.
Re:College? (Score:3, Interesting)
(I only knew a couple of BASIC and Fortran variants before I got to college, and I'd never designed anything larger than a few thousand lines of code, so some of that stuff was new to me. This was back in 1981, after all, when not everyone had access to programming classes, and self-taught Applesoft BASIC programmers like myself weren't really known for writing structured code ).
Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park (Score:3, Interesting)
I assume it was solving a cryptic crossword [telegraph.co.uk] in under 12 minutes.
English cryptic crosswords are notoriously difficult, at least in part because of their assumed local knowledge (e.g. "Mayfair" stands for the two letters "WI".) I've seen one where virtually all of the clues referenced the answer of others - until you solve the key clues, you can't even start! Another had no numbers - you have to solve all of the clues first, then fit them together jigsaw style... Australian cryptics are much easier.
Re:It Seemed to Work for Bletchley Park (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course it was the wrong answer. The ability to analyze a bit of C code (whether or not you think it's "abberent") is an important skill, when determining what a piece of code IS doing as opposed to what it APPEARS to be doing or is DOCUMENTED as doing.